You canât talk like this on ET. It doesnât make any sense to the 45+ crowd around here. They all think young people are lazy and donât feel like doing real work. They bash people for going into debt because their jobs donât pay enough for even a low standard of living, and then reluctantly admit that in order to make more money, youâll probably have to go to college, and to pay for that, you have to go big into debt. Their solution to the problem is the problem itself. They worked in the Summer to pay for their whole years room and board, now kids work in the Summer just to have a few dollars in their pocket. I remember awhile ago a guy here was saying how young people think they should all just get 30k jobs handed to them, implying that when he was growing up they never got those. He then said that his son was working at Wal-Mart for $8.50 an hour. I did some simple calculations and took the minimum wage from 30 years ago, multiplied it by the CPI every year (which we all know is a scam anyways) and then added the % above minimum wage that Wal-Mart was paying him and multiplied that by 40 hours and 50 weeks. You want to know what his son should be making? Yea thatâs right, $30,000 for stocking shelves at Wal-Mart! Thatâs what somebody made 30 years ago. The salary gets even higher if you index it to housing prices. So inevitably whatâs the solution offered to young people? Just work harder to get the same thing your parents got. And then you wonder why 90% of them voted for Obama or Ron Paul. Letâs also not forget that corporate America sold everybody out. Anything they can do to make a quick profit.
I was at the bank the other day to make a routine visit and I got mauled by a personal banker and then their investment advisor. Both of them had Vice President on their business cards - go figure. We got to talking about the economy and the banking system (no surprise there eh?) and these two characters were more clueless than your 30-something crowd. Working at one of the biggest banks in the world, they didn't have a clue how the banking system actually worked. I wasn't surprised really. Most people have absolutely no clue. Even in the midst of the catastrophe we find ourselves in people still don't have much of a clue why or how we got here. They all think it's a few deadbeats who got wrapped up in a sub-prime mortgage.
Ultra high living standards compared to whom? The Ethiopians who are more concerned with religion than feeding themselves? When you compare real wages to those of the previous generation, this current generation is worse off.
My old man was a carpenter and fed a family of 6 on one wage. We went without some things but otherwise did quite well. The money bubble has trashed the living standards compared to how it was when I was kid.
Our banking system is a ponzi scheme, eventually it all blows up. If you create $100 out of thin air and lend it with interest, how is somebody supposed to pay back $105 if there is only $100 in the money supply? The only way they can is to borrow more money to pay back the original interest. That canât go on forever. BTW itâs all the baby boomer Republicans who think itâs the poor people that Clinton let get mortgages that caused all of this. They get this info from Sean Hannity you know.
When you look at the access to education, many Americans could not afford college or to even graduate high school until the second half of the 20th century. Real wages have gone down, that is correct and if you look at the types of professions in America it has shifted from mainly labor intensive production based to non-labor intensive consumer based. All the government spending for programs and such have balooned. This whole welfare class that we have today has not existed before. The government spending accounts for grants, school funding, police enforcement, military spending, prisons, etc, that should not be taken for granted. The very fact that the living standard is upheld on a credit bubble including government credit illustrates the point of an excessively high living standard. If the dollar was not the reserve currency, the purchasing power would drop dramatically and many of these government programs and non-labor intensive consumer based occupations would cease to exist.
Access to education doesn't mean a whole lot. Simple supply and demand. Fifty years ago, only 25% of Americans had a HS diploma. Today 80% have a HS diploma, where as 25% have a bachelors degree. The more people who have one, the more meaningless it is. If the government never meddled with the education system, you'd have less people with degrees, but it would simply be the norm. What value is a degree when everyone has one? You would be correct in your assumptions if this recession only effected blue-collar workers or those working in professions that don't require a college degree, but that's clearly not the case. Bright American students are graduating from college and can't find jobs that pay a wage on par with the cost of living. Forty or fifty years ago, a kid could get a job right out of high school that paid well enough to actually support himself and still have some disposable income.
Yes and those high school kids often went to production-based jobs rather than consumption. Now since this whole economy is based on a consumer bubble, when that pops they will have to revert to production based jobs ultimately. All of the consummable items such as expensive german cars and Mcmansions, etc were nowhere near as common as they are today.
American cars were cheap (much cheaper than european luxury cars, especially) mass-produced gas guzzlers, there wasn't any real competition for them until the Japanese showed up and started making moderately priced mass-produced energy efficient cars. The Germans competed mainly on the luxury front in the US, and now the luxury car market is a lot larger than it was back then. The Fact that the US can afford to SPEND so much on education shows the high living standard, other countries may perform better but that has to do with EFFICIENCY not SPENDING. The gdp per capita of the US is superseded by small european and asian countries like luxembourg and Qatar, but none of them can compare to the third largest country in the world with a population of over 306 million. LOL the consumer based jobs have disappeared? The economy is over 70% consumption much of that needs to disappear first. Yes the living standard is artificially high, it is propped up by the dollar, if the dollar was not the reserve the purchasing power of the dollar would be a lot lower and so would the living standard, THAT IS A FACT.